Cause of tonight's outage, in one line: `await inbound.start()`. The inbound lens subscribes to a remote index and backfills over HTTP. Awaiting it made a LOCAL, P2P-FIRST node refuse to serve until a REMOTE WEB SERVICE answered. The full chain, because no single link was sufficient: 1. Both backends run autoupdate:true, so a publish restarts them SIMULTANEOUSLY and guarantees a window with no healthy backend. 2. Apache proxies to them with ProxyTimeout 3600, so each hung request holds a worker for up to an hour. All 18 drained; it stopped answering EVERYTHING, including ap.7rnx.net, whose backend was healthy throughout. 3. This boot fetch then went through that saturated proxy with no deadline — bare-fetch silently drops `timeout` (its Request destructures only body/method/headers/signal/agent; verified in lib/request.js) — and hung forever. So it deadlocked: the daemon could not finish booting until the proxy recovered, and the proxy could not recover while its workers were held by requests to the daemon. Only restarting Apache broke it. Every one of those three was a known, documented, unfixed item in #47. None mattered alone. The lens is an ENHANCEMENT — it fills in replies from outside this node's window. Without it the timeline still renders. So it starts in the background and reports failure rather than blocking, and a failure now says what is missing instead of being silent. ★ Deliberately NOT "bounded with a timeout". A deadline would turn a permanent hang into a slow boot, when the correct answer is that a phone, tabertron and ashatron are P2P nodes whose readiness does not depend on a web bridge at all. AbortSignal is not available under bare regardless — it is not a global, and bare-abort's default export is a fatal-abort helper, not an AbortController — so #47's suggested fix does not exist as written. NOT fixed here, and worth its own change: `await swarm.flush()` (755, 771) also gates server.listen and is unbounded. That is P2P rather than web coupling, but it is the likely reason boot is slow enough for step 1 to matter. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>